


Fives Times Seeking, One Time Finding

by LittleRaven



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Destiny, Fate, Fate & Destiny, Five Times, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Shippy Gen, exchange_of_hearts2018, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 22:17:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17733674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: A duck's love is unconditional, but a heart that can love may want to be loved back.





	Fives Times Seeking, One Time Finding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BubblySage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BubblySage/gifts).



In the beginning, it doesn’t matter. So Ahiru is a duck. She’s always been a duck, even without the memory of it. If it dreams like a duck, moves like a duck, gets called a duck—well that is the way of it. She can’t change fate. 

Still, to watch like a duck; she doesn’t even think of it. Ahiru watches, and wants, and it’s for herself. The deal isn’t hard to make. A chance to do more than a duck can do, and so. She is a girl too, now, and there are hearts to heal. People to discover. 

Hand over pendant, wing over pendant. She closes her eyes. The duck can’t help. The girl can’t help. But she can know. The swan princess can help. She can fly, she can dance—she can be listened to. 

So. 

Here she is, the one who can make a difference. A princess for a prince, a princess for a people, and they respond as gently as those in a fairy tale, those in need—to the right one, because she shows up at the end. She can be a princess, and a cat can be a teacher, to make things happy. She hopes Mr. Cat is happy. 

Her wings burst forth, and she sweeps out with them, to the music of the heart in need of her to reach it.   
This is what she wants, for herself. To be what is needed. The smile that brings other smiles. To see those smiles, that smile, directed at her. 

She may be the only duck who has felt love, known regret at not being able to act for it. Or she may be the only one given a chance to act. 

Ahiru wonders, questions, but in the end: she has a story now. Best to find her role in it. 

 

Her role is done, almost. She sits, frenzied, behind the fountain, not happy about it. Fakir and Mytho are talking and here she is again, stewing in her emotions, watching. Even being a girl doesn’t save her from that. 

It’s not enough to be a girl. It’s not enough to be Tutu, because that’s not all of who she is, and so that must not be her. Mytho can be a prince turned schoolboy, Fakir a knight—she doesn’t think he’s so very bad at it, he’s helped her help Mytho, and Rue—not Rue. 

Rue is the only one besides her who isn’t both, not really. Ahiru can’t believe Rue is anything but herself; all the pain she’d seen proved it. Kraehe is as much a mask as Tutu. She knows the pain of playing a part. Then she squelches the thought. Tutu isn’t a pain to be, is she? Tutu is a gift, a tool, something useful. She has no business comparing herself to Rue. 

Rue is more like Mytho, she decides. Surrounded by others, yet somehow alone. She needed help just as much. If only Ahiru knew how to put her together.

She can. If it’s Mytho’s will that Tutu helps him, and if it’s Rue’s will that Ahiru helps her. She won’t give up trying. 

Maybe that’s one thing Ahiru can be good for. 

 

What is there left for her to do? It’s not Ahiru’s story. It was never Ahiru’s story, Rue had told her. It hasn’t mattered until now; does she really think it was otherwise? She is happy doing her part, she always has been. 

Is her part over then? Is that it? She follows Fakir around only to be sent away with scorn. Just like before, when he was being a knight. Except now, he is being a writer. A knight she could work with as an equal—more, she thinks to herself, burning red with shame for it, since his attempts to protect Mytho had failed. A writer, it seems, works alone. At least he learns alone, she amends, hearing Autor jangling in her head. 

She can’t even master one art; how can she help him learn another? 

There aren’t even any more heart shards she can find and put back. Her small role, and she’s stalled, failing. She’d failed too before, just as much as Fakir had. It has just taken longer for her to realize it, and doesn’t that make her worse?

Maybe it’s better for Ahiru to be alone too. No one should be burdened with her inability to help, least of all someone who is still useful. Better to let Fakir have a chance. 

Yes. She can stop trying. That’s the only way for Ahiru to help. 

When Pike and Lilie fend off Mr. Cat, she takes a moment to smile at them. She’ll never be good at ballet, but at least for now, they want her to be a girl with them. 

 

A duck, called into the story to become a girl. Well, isn’t that something. There’s another writer, who’s not Fakir, and he does want her. He just also wants her to do what he says. Should she? Shouldn’t she feel as he says she must feel? Naturally. That’s his word. 

She does, still. She wants to help Mytho, because she loves him. But for herself...she’s wanted him to smile at her all this time, but here is this writer, telling her she must want him all for herself, all the while she can’t express it, and can’t have his love anyway if she does nothing to restore his heart. If she keeps those shards a secret to trap the Raven, as she is now being asked. 

None of it makes sense. Ahiru is here to do a thing she has now been asked not to do, for the sake of a love she is gleefully being denied, by a man who claims to know her feelings. He seems so certain—but he can’t be, because he brought her to this place. He doesn’t let her speak, even to answer his questions, pressing again and again like he’s stating a fact, delivering a threat. 

It’s so natural to him that she would comply, to the point where he thinks he can try to make her if he must, but the fact that he feels he must…

Ahiru doesn’t know what it means. She’s not a writer. She does know her feelings. She knows she wants to leave. She wants to be useful. She wants to do what her friends have asked of her, that no one else can do. 

Too, she knows a writer who is different. He wants the same things she does. She can hear his voice.   
Fakir does want her, and he wants her to come back. It’s as if her feelings can reach him—well they should, and it’s about time, she’s screamed them at him long enough—and he’s finally reaching back, taking her hand instead of rejecting her, letting her in rather than pushing her out. 

She’s always wished he would dance with her. 

 

Being granted a wish is always a strange thing. Ahiru wants to help, and she becomes first a girl, then a princess. Ahiru wants Rue to be Rue, to be her friend, to express her suffering to her, and Rue does it to get sacrificed. Ahiru wants Mytho to be whole, and to smile at her, but it’s Rue who saves him and it’s Ahiru who can’t make the sacrifice he requires of her. 

Fakir wants her to restore Mytho’s heart, and she can’t bear to do it. She can’t. She can’t be Tutu always, can’t be loved that way, but she hoped maybe, as a girl, it could happen. As a duck, it can’t. Who loves a duck? A duck doesn’t dance, or talk, or dream. A duck doesn’t help. A duck watches, and gets thrown a crumb, a smile—a bit of tenderness from someone in exchange for them doing a little watching of their own. 

Does that make them happy? Seeing a duck be herself, accomplishing nothing? 

She thinks of the first time Rue smiled at her. She’d been trying to warn her away from seeing Mytho with Anteaterina, spare her the heartbreak. She’d wanted to make Mytho smile, to soothe Rue’s pain, to bring comfort to Fakir; and the first smile she’d gotten from any of them was as a quacking, flapping duck.

Fakir had smiled at her then too. He was so kind, and it has been so hard to see a sign of that side ever since, as a girl. She sometimes forgets that he has it. 

Here he is now, dancing with her at last. 

Ahiru has promised to be what Mytho needs, to give Rue and Fakir and everyone the chance to heal. She wants that for herself, despite learning she was called into someone else’s story, despite the tragedy Drosselmeyer tried to make her give him. 

Being a duck isn’t the same as disappearing. She’s not a speck of light. It doesn’t matter if she’s not a girl—the girl, in the end, is not who is needed. She’s not the one whose love is shared, given back in the dance. 

Being Princess Tutu, unable to speak her love or restore her prince, sounds a much lonelier fate. 

The dance ends. Princess Tutu presents Mytho with the heart that had called her for help. The duck watches, and the prince watches her back, bowing. 

 

Fakir has made her, a duck, a promise. He keeps it.


End file.
